The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
As mobile data and civilian location positioning systems proliferate, one widespread use of these systems is the tracking and management of mobile assets such as vehicle fleets and workforce resources. Such systems generally use a position-determining device (e.g., a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver) associated with a mobile asset to determine the location of the asset. Using a communication channel—typically a wireless channel such as a mobile telephony channel, a mobile broadband channel, a terrestrial microwave channel, or a satellite channel—the device reports its current location to a central tracking server that tracks and manages the assets.
Owing to the mobile nature of the position-determining devices, such devices typically rely on portable power sources (e.g., batteries), rather than line power. For this reason, and because wireless communication channels are generally bandwidth constrained, there is an inherent tension between power conservation and position accuracy. Specifically, the more frequently a mobile asset reports its location, the more accurately its location will be tracked, but the greater energy resources it will consume. Generally, this tension is “resolved” by setting a tracking device to report a position on a regular interval that is a trade-off between power conservation and position accuracy.